Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  And the party that’s being planned for tomorrow infuriates her. Bebette could at least have asked for her opinion, find out whether she wanted a party or not, if it was important to her to be turning eleven! And most of all that they are marking it with balloons and multicoloured confetti and everybody singing “Happy Birthday.” She has no desire to see again the eighteen hysterical individuals who met her at the station, or to pretend she was thrilled that they were taking an interest in her, the poor child people feel so sorry for, who would be spending her birthday all alone unless they took charge! She doesn’t want to be taken charge of. She’d rather spend her birthday in silence, have them forget about her visit to Saint-Boniface or keep a vague memory of a polite little second cousin who passed through their lives discreetly, without bothering them, and then disappeared without a trace.

  But no.

  She heard the dreadful Bebette howl on the telephone for a good part of the evening, issuing commands; ordering a pink-and-green cake – that’s right, even the colours! – from her daughter Gaétane and party sandwiches from someone she called Lolotte who might have been Colette or Charlotte; protest when someone told her that they might not be able to attend the party; threaten with plenty of deafening saperlipopettes; promise with veiled words abuse that would be remembered for a long time if they weren’t present and proud to be; laugh excitedly when she got a new idea. In fact, Rhéauna is beginning to wonder if her great-aunt Bebette is planning this party for herself, to pass some time, to fill an evening, to busy herself because she has nothing to do in life but feed her obese husband. Besides, it isn’t normal for a woman her age to need so badly to plan a birthday party for an eleven-year-old child! After all, she is only the sister of the child’s grandfather, not her grandmother!

  Rhéauna punches her pillow a few times, tries to find a bit that’s not wet with tears. She won’t sleep tonight, she can feel it, and the party tomorrow night will be a nightmare even worse than she can imagine. Actually, she didn’t see many children this afternoon. Does that mean it’s going to be an adult party, a party for old people, a children’s party with no children, something boring and endless with everybody pretending they’re enjoying themselves when they’re actually bored to death? Will the guests eat the fancy sandwiches reluctantly in the hope that the goddamn party will be over as soon as possible and the goddamn child will finally disappear?

  All that’s missing from Bebette’s plans, which are doomed to be disastrous, is for her to dress her Rosaire as a clown, though it is rather amusing to imagine Rosaire dressed like a buffoon! Rhéauna smiles in spite of herself, is annoyed with herself to have thought of something so mean, pulls her knees up to her stomach and starts to hum as she used to do in Maria whenever she was sad. It relieves her a little but not enough to put her to sleep.

  Something that her mother told her comes back suddenly. Something that hadn’t struck her at first but that suddenly seems very important. She unfolds herself, turns onto her back, looks at the ceiling where the light from the streetlamp in front of the house, and the night wind, are drawing ghosts on the curtains.

  Her mother said that she works nights. When will they see each other if she goes to school in the daytime and her mother works at night? Why make her come to Montreal if they have different timetables? A strange suspicion, a vague concern creeps into her head. She can’t say what it is but she knows that it’s disturbing, maybe even threatening.

  Her mother hasn’t brought her to Montreal because she missed her; there’s some other reason that she doesn’t want to own up to. A secret. She needs her but she can’t say why. Like in a novel.

  In her circle, they thought at first that Bebette Desrosiers had been put on earth to make them happy. Vivacious, amusing, generous, she assumed the role of the eldest of the Desrosiers girls and very early was giving orders in place of their mother – a woman of delicate health who had nearly died giving birth to her last child, Régina-Coeli – who trusted her because she was structured and responsible. But she’d been quick to take her role a little too seriously. Although still the funny Bebette that they knew – in fact, she used her sense of humour to get out of the difficult situations in which she often found herself – she had started to rule over everything in the house, each person’s tasks and timetables as well as organizing meals and the family budget. She still made everybody laugh, while showing her own astonishing self-confidence. And appearing curt when she felt that she should be, which was pretty well all the time.

  And so she had transformed herself without too much trouble into the tormentor of the little sister that she saw, as did other members of the family, more as a servant of the household than as the youngest daughter of the Desrosiers family. Bebette gave the orders, Régina obeyed. It wasn’t written down anywhere, it was just something they accepted without argument. And it had gone on for years.

  The two sisters had never been close. An open animosity had in fact been established because both had a short fuse and the slightest thing would send them into fits of rage that were often exacerbated by the frustration of one or the touchiness of the other: Régina-Coeli was regularly fed up with being picked on by everyone in general and Bebette in particular, even though that was the role she’d taken on long before, and her older sister accepted no resistance to her often peremptory orders or to her cruel and at times unjust criticisms. Next came endless, monster, screaming matches that went on and on, always crowned with slamming doors or dreadful meals. Although Régina complained to their father, an alcoholic farmer who, since his wife had taken sick, preferred his animals’ company to his children’s, nothing changed: Bebette was still the undisputed boss of the Desrosiers tribe, Régina the servant.

  Her sister’s comical side also got on the nerves of the cold, skinny Régina who lacked any sense of humour and she let her know. And so the two sisters grew up, each on her own side, without trying to understand one another, Régina devoted in spite of herself to the well-being of the others, Bebette snowed under by responsibilities too great for a girl her age.

  Bebette, though, had had a radiant childhood made up of discreet searches and surprising discoveries because she was interested in everything: what animals do to reproduce; what makes nature so angry that she creates blizzards and electrical storms; what makes birds fly and snakes slither. And human beings laugh. She liked to laugh herself and to make others laugh since her early childhood, she had played clown to stimulate family get-togethers, consulted her books of jokes that had belonged to her father and of which she’d learned long extracts by heart – she liked people to be cheerful and she wanted it to show. She had the nuns at school laughing and even – it had happened several times – the priests at confession. She was an invigorating ray of sunshine and everyone adored her.

  Until the arrival of Régina-Coeli anyway, when overnight she found herself head of the family with adult responsibilities and problems she didn’t always understand. For some years she tried to settle everything with her gift for repartee, she managed to shut them all up all the time, no one dared talk back to her and everyone submitted to her. She always got what she wanted with the help of a well-placed joke, a clever pun, her reputation for shouting her head off. She ruled, she was feared, but she was very unhappy when she realized one day that she wasn’t sure she was respected.

  That was when she became a dragon. To get some respect.

  Her sense of humour disappeared all at once as if she’d wakened one morning miraculously transformed and had forgotten who she’d been the day before. No more joking or punning or clown’s faces, Élisabeth Desrosiers was henceforth the serious head of a household and, if anyone didn’t like it, they’d better watch out.

  As soon as her new character was found – at first her brothers and sisters had thought it was a joke but quickly realized that it was serious, definitive and that they’d better get used to it – she’d begun to search for something that would belong only to her, some personal detail, some expression to
be associated only with her, that made you say when you saw it or heard it that you couldn’t help thinking about Bebette Desrosiers. Like Queen Victoria’s lace bonnets. Or the Blessed Virgin’s blue robe. She had tried all sorts of things: extravagant hats you could spot two blocks away or clothes so severe you might think that she’d joined a religious community; also, the stentorian voice that she’d had to develop as head of the family and that she made even more threatening or – something totally unlike her – a soft voice in which you could, however, sense a chilliness that sent a chill up your spine and even curses that weren’t oaths but did make an impression. Tabarnouche, for example, derived from the Québécois tabarnac, which itself sprang from the liturgical tabernacle: it was quickly discarded as too vulgar; or lime green, which she thought was pointless even if it had the merit of originality; or a flute uttered at the right time, in the right place, which she thought was too short to be effective. When she finally found what would make her a celebrity and even a legend all over Saint-Boniface – her famous saperlipopette – she still held on to her extravagant hats and her stentorian voice. The latter reinforced the devastating effect of the well-timed interjection whereas the hats gave her a queenly bearing.

  And so she unearthed her saperlipopette in an old French novel, published in the mid-nineteenth century as a serial that for some unknown reason had turned up in Saint-Boniface. The word was used by a ridiculous gendarme, the comic relief in the story, who brought it out on many and varied occasions. She had immediately thought the word interesting because it had five syllables you could emphasize in turn according to need: saper-li-po-pette!, sa-per-li-po-pette!, sa-per-li-po-pette!, etc. and she’d tried it out rather timidly on her family and friends. With no real results. They had looked at her, frowning, some had burst out laughing – Régina-Coeli, for example, ultimate insult to her authority – Méo had even asked her where she’d got that word they’d never heard before, that took off in every direction. She hadn’t been discouraged and had polished it in front of her mirror that evening – for some time she’d been entitled, as the eldest of the daughters, to her very own bedroom – copying querulous expressions and trying to make the word snap like a whip, her forefinger pointed and brows tightly knit. She’d realized that by separating the first two syllables and speeding up the other three – sa-per-lipopette! – while using a hollow, disturbing voice, she achieved a fairly satisfying result that actually impressed her.

  She had used it first with the young grocery delivery boy – “Sa-per-lipopette, Tancrède, can’t you do something about those muddy boots!” – who had left the house white with terror. Well, that was something, at least it scared the children. After that she had hurled it at the woman in the post office on Boulevard Provencher who had jumped as if she’d been hit and tried to excuse the faltering Canadian postal service for an inexplicable delay – the package she asked for had never existed, Bebette just wanted to try out her oath on someone she didn’t know to test its effectiveness – then at the butcher whom she’d accused, leaning heavily on theoretically scandalized saperlipopettes, of pressing his thumb on the scale when he weighed the meat. He’d apologized – so it was true! – and had shown her out himself after making her a gift of three enormous pork kidneys that no one wanted except the Desrosiers family who oddly enough was fond of them. As for the mailman, he had reacted to her saperlipopette as if he were grappling with a rabid dog that was about to tear off part of his pants along with a good long strip of bleeding flesh.

  She had waited, though, before bringing it out to her family. Convinced that she finally had the right way to terrorize them, she particularly didn’t want to relive the flop of her first attempt. She waited for the auspicious moment, the winning conditions.

  The key event, the moment when you could say that she’d finally found the devastating character she was looking for, had occurred at one of those meals, a Sunday supper, when everything seems to be working toward creating a disaster. It started with the soup, which, besides not tasting of anything much, had been served lukewarm, which the father had always hated. Bebette had used the opportunity to show how sarcastic she could be with her sister. Her father had given her a smile of complicity; that had been her reward, for he very rarely smiled. Most likely because he was usually loaded. And fuming. Régina-Coeli had apologized, claiming that the oldest ones – Méo and Bebette herself – had delayed coming to the table, that she’d had to shout several times that the soup was served and getting cold. Bebette had swallowed the reproach, telling herself that Régina-Coeli had it coming to her. Then the roast veal was overcooked – charred according to Bebette – the potatoes lumpy, the gravy too thin and the dessert, a blueberry pie, a specialty of Régina’s, too dry and not sweet enough. More and more depressed, she served, cleared the table with her head down and back bent; she tripped on the rug and couldn’t stop apologizing.

  During the whole meal you could feel the tension growing between Bebette and Régina-Coeli. Régina gave in to her sister’s criticisms; Bebette overstated her exasperation a little to set the scene for her final explosion, the official entrance of the ringing and lethal saperlipopette she’d been preparing for so long and that would finally confirm her, so she hoped, in her role of head of the family, because her father was too weak to assume it and her mother too sick to take over.

  The opportunity presented itself when the coffee was served, pure slops according to Bebette, insipid dishwater you wouldn’t dare serve to the beggar who came to the door at Christmas, a disastrous end to an atrocious meal.

  Until then, Régina-Coeli had put up with everything, hardly saying a word, content to shake her head at her sister’s rude remarks or taking refuge in the kitchen to hide her rancour. But she reacted very badly to the criticism of her coffee. Because she had tasted that coffee and thought it excellent. In any case as good as that morning’s which hadn’t elicited any rude remark. Maybe even a little better. And so Bebette hadn’t finished her remark that denigrated her supposed dishwater when Régina, who once again was going to leave the dining room without asking her due, had gone back to the doorstep, returned to the room and rested both hands on the table as she leaned toward her older sister.

  “I put up with a lot tonight, Bebette, during the whole meal, but you aren’t going to criticize my coffee! It’s good, my coffee! And I forbid you to claim that it isn’t!”

  Overjoyed at the opportunity being offered her on a silver platter as they say, Bebette stood up, regal, gave the table a slap, just one but resounding, and fired off her first sa-per-lipopette, delivered the way she’d rehearsed it in front of her mirror so often, like a great actress sure of the impression she would make; the first two syllables carefully separated, sa-per, then the last three in one burst, lipopette. It fell like a blade on the history of the Desrosiers family: from now on there would be the time before the saperlipopette and the time after, that of Bebette and her terrifying oath that frightened everyone, putting an end to any discussion and settling everything to her advantage.

  Everyone in the room had frozen. A talented caricaturist would have had time to sketch each member of the family, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, so long were they motionless. Lightning had just struck the house. Bebette stared at them all one by one to make sure they’d got the point, even her parents who lowered their heads, too. Ending with Régina-Coeli, who was the first to move and run off to the kitchen, where shortly after she could be heard slamming the dirty dishes around in the sink. The meal ended in nearly religious silence and Bebette got up from the table without saying good night to anyone. In her room, planted in front of her mirror, she allowed herself a victorious grin. Thank you, Régina.

  And so the legend of Bebette Desrosiers’s saperlipopette was born, then spread at dizzying speed through the parish, then over all Saint-Boniface. Bebette became the person you didn’t want to hear saying saperlipopette – it made the children howl, the old folks cry, teenagers tremble – to the point that in the end people were w
illing to do whatever she wanted to avoid it. When she was walking on the street in one of her incredible hats, head high, gaze provocative, people crossed the street to avoid her. The butcher never pressed his thumb on the scale, the woman at the post office shook when she appeared at her metal wicket, Tancrède invented fits to get out of delivering grocery orders for the Desrosiers family.

  It was not respect that Bebette inspired all her life, it was fear. But she never made the distinction.

  Only one man resisted it, though, that saperlipopette of hers, a foreman on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a giant who would never be impressed by the Desrosiers dragon, who would even love her as seldom had a dragon been loved. And she wouldn’t bother him, would never fling an offensive saperlipopette at him because she knew that it would be pointless, that it would never have an effect on him. Without letting herself be totally dominated by him, something she could never do – she will allow her beloved Rosaire to resist her, to discuss the soundness of her decisions, to hold her back sometimes when she has a tendency to go too far with manipulation and emotional blackmail. Out of love. Out of devotion. Out of admiration. But that’s another story …

  That saperlipopette is still striking today, in 1913, years and years later. It’s famous now across the entire city, it is discussed, feared, it’s the subject of zany or terrible legends, Bebette having long ago replaced the werewolf and the bogeyman in the inhabitants’ nightmares.

  Anyway, Rhéauna, who’s not too bothered by it, maybe because she isn’t from Saint-Boniface and doesn’t feel obliged to play along, keeps hearing it all evening, sometimes murmured to be convincing, sometimes shouted to terrify. Always on the phone. And it seems to work because that blasted birthday party the next day is gradually taking shape as the hours pass. Along with the pink-and-green birthday cake – Gaétane; and the crustless sandwiches – Lolotte; apparently there will be huge platters of raw vegetables (celery, carrots, radishes) adorned with yellowish-orange pimento cheese – Olivine; stuffed olives, as much tomato juice and orange juice as anyone wants; salted peanuts – Camille; and even party hats and bags of confetti – Bebette herself.